Agile Blog

The other day a manager called me and asked if I would recommend sending one of his people to one of my Professional Scrum Master classes. I told him no.

In the early 1950′s, cake mix was introduced in the U.S. Take some mix, add water, and put it in the oven. In ten minutes you had a homemade cake. Great idea, right? It wasn’t. Really bad idea actually. Huge failure! Until one of the vendors figured out what the problem was, took action accordingly [...]

On my way to work today I heard that the Swedish government demands that meteorologists increase the precision of their weather forecasts to 85%. Have they heard about the butterfly effect? Are knowledge about complexity theory and chaotic systems optional for running a country? One would hope not! How about for running a business? A [...]

Once I got lost driving to the airport and kept driving for so long before asking for directions so that I missed my flight home… With people in nothern Europe returning from their vacations I have two questions for all of you that are using daily standup meetings in your teams: 1. How long were [...]

Who has got the most power over your team? Is it your manager, or perhaps your local tech guru? Well…probably not! Not if you picked a reasonably motivated individual anyway… According to team building expert Christopher Avery, the most powerful member of a team is

Traditionally developed software does not age gracefully. In fact, on average, it only takes about five years for newly developed software to deteriorate to a state where it is no longer economically feasible to maintain it. I.e. the cost of adding new features is larger than the income that the new features would generate. Why [...]

One of the best ways to get started with an effort to get more agile is to co-locate teams, creating “war-rooms” for them to work in. Studies like this show that co-locating teams at least doubles productivity. In the study above, the teams that used the new facilities after the study was finished actually did [...]

The last part in our three part series about agile development and contracts will provide a glimpse into the future by looking at how thought leaders have managed contracts to foster cooperation between companies and to create superior performance in complex environments: Are rigid contracts needed for protection so that companies will not take advantage [...]

Continuing our three part series about contracts and agile software development, here is part 2 about how to handle the fixed price environment that most of us work in today: If you are an agile development organization, but you do actually have to submit a bid for a fixed price, fixed scope contract anyway,

When presenting the agile approach to audiences new to the ideas, one comment is by far the most common. It is: “How can we do this, we have to work with fixed scope, fixed price contracts?” We will cover this question in a three part newsletter,